


a fairytale ending

by Sixthlight



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Curses, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Polyamory, cameos from the Belgravia crew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 11:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10830303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: “Hey,” said Abigail, “I almost forgot. I found a thing, and I think it’s magic.”





	a fairytale ending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamingjewel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamingjewel/gifts).



“Hey,” said Abigail, as we were about to leave the Folly one Sunday afternoon so I could drop her at her place before going home to Bev’s for the evening. “I almost forgot. I found a thing, and I think it’s magic.”

“Right,” I said, dubiously. “What sort of thing?” Over the past few years Abigail had located a number of items, places, and people she thought were magical. I’d learned to tell from the way she told me about it whether it was likely to be true. Stuff that she assured me was ‘totally magic’ almost never was. Stuff she said was ‘a bit weird, maybe, I dunno’ was almost inevitably magical and occasionally dangerous. Abigail was smart enough to know the difference. I’d never figured out why she was cagier when she was right.

She fished around in her jacket pocket – it was her old quilted blue one and noticeably too short in the sleeves now – and pulled out something small and silver, on a chain. I held out my hand and she dropped it in. It was, at first glance, some sort of locket.

“Where did you get this?” I couldn’t help asking. It looked old, and possibly valuable beyond the metal itself.

“Nicked it,” Abigail shrugged, deadpan, and I fell for it long enough to glare at her. She laughed. “I’m not _stupid_. One of my mates from uni likes going to antique shops and things – I don’t know why, half the time they follow us around the shop – and she bought this box. It was in it.”

“And she just let you have it?”

“Well,” said Abigail. “Maybe I nicked it from her, a little bit. When I touched it I knew it was magic. I’ll give it back if you say it’s okay. I just didn’t want to have to have an argument with her about it, because I couldn’t tell _her_ that.”

“For future reference,” I said, “you could have just called me and we could have made up something about it being an item of interest in an ongoing investigation, or whatever. Given her a receipt, done it properly.” It wouldn’t even have been making something up – the locket would have been the thing we were investigating.

“She would have got weird about police,” Abigail said. “You’re police.”

“You want to be police, if you’re serious about joining up here for real.”

Abigail grimaced. “Yeah, I don’t talk about that with her.”

I just nodded; there were a few people from the estate who’d stopped talking to me when I’d started as a PCSO.

On closer inspection, the locket was definitely valuable. There was enough silver around the Folly, kept to a mirror polish by Molly, that I could recognise the genuine nature of the locket by weight and colour. On the back it had the hallmarks that would tell me – if I cared, and used a magnifying glass – who had made it, and when, and where. I did spot the tiny imprint of Queen Victoria’s profile that meant duty had been paid on it, and that it had been made before 1890. It was about the size of a pound coin and delicately engraved with vines and flowers.

And, did I mention, it had definitely had a close encounter with magic, either very strong and a very long time ago or faint and recent. The style of the engraving made me suspect it was the former. I’d been a wizard long enough to recognise an enchanted object when I saw one.

It was clearly a piece of jewellery, and clearly made for a woman – at least by the gender mores of late-nineteenth-century Britain – but the _vestigia_ it carried included the smell of cigar smoke, pungent and strong, as well as the fainter scent of rosewater and the pricking feel of heavy pins against your scalp, the kind you might use to secure a hat or an elaborate hairstyle. There was something else, at the back of it all, a greedy grasping feeling of acquisitiveness. It wasn’t pleasant.

“Well, good call,” I told Abigail. “Someone’s been using magic around this. I think maybe someone from the Folly, a long time ago.”

“Duh,” she said, “I _told_ you it was magic,” but I could see she was a little relieved to be right, and to have help with it. Abigail had been around long enough, and picked up enough, that she would have felt that _vestigium_ at least as well as I would have in the early years of my apprenticeship. “So is it dangerous?”

I dropped it from one hand to another. The chain slid coolly through my fingers. “Not obviously. Have you opened it?”

“Nope.”

I sat down on one of the armchairs, and after concentrating a little longer to be safe – you couldn’t fit a whole demon trap into something this small, but there were plenty of unpleasant surprises you could – I cast a fourth-order variant on the telescope spell I’d learned years ago, to get a better look at the engraving. There was, in a curving tiny script, some writing. It said – I thought – _noli me tangere._

Abigail bent her head in along with me – she had to get close to get the right angle through the lens of air I’d created.

“You’re squinting,” she pointed out. “Maybe you need glasses.”

“Fuck off,” I said, although with the amount of reading entailed by both wizardry and modern policing, if I got to forty without reading glasses I’d be pleasantly surprised. But there was nothing wrong with my eyesight yet.

“Touch me not,” she went on. “Well, we did that and nothing happened.”

“It’s probably not meant literally,” I said. “It’s a quote from a poem.”

“About Anne Boleyn,” said Abigail, which surprised me. “I read about it somewhere.”

“What on earth are you two so intent on?” came Nightingale’s voice; I looked up to see him standing over us, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He’d gone out for a post-lunch walk with Toby, who was sniffing inquisitively at Abigail’s knee; Abigail pushed the dog away, and he sat obediently.

“Abigail found a magical locket,” I said. “Have a look. It’s enchanted, but I don’t _think_ it’s dangerous. It was rattling around in an antique shop.”

“How very reassuring,” he said, taking it off me, and examined it.

“Do you think it does something?” Abigail wanted to know.

“It might be intended to be protective,” he said dubiously. “The _signare_ feels familiar, but nobody I–”

He was still speaking as he flicked the catch open, and the blast wave caught all of us by surprise.

It wasn’t, I hasten to add, an actual physical blast wave, or even the serious metaphysical kind you get off demon traps and the like. It was just the distinct after-effects of magic being set off washing out across the atrium, a combination of the _vestigium_ I’d already sensed, but with something else, too, the soft _snick_ of a key in a lock, the creak of knotted rope. I was on my feet before I had time to think about it, on the tips of my toes, tensed for action. Toby starting barking, sharp and high-pitched, not excited but frightened. Abigail sprang up too, hands clenching into fists at her sides, eyes wide. I made a distant mental note that my suspicions about her picking stuff up off Caroline Linden-Limmer were probably not just paranoia, but that really wasn’t important right now.

Nightingale had dropped the locket as soon as he’d felt the magic hit and it had bounced off the floor at his feet. He took a quick step back, looked sharply from side to side, and then back down.

A second ticked by, and another second, and nothing happened. Another, and Molly appeared next to Nightingale – it had taken her that time to get up here from the kitchen, I thought, even if I hadn't really seen her cross the atrium – her skirts swishing into stillness as she came to a halt. She frowned at him, and then me and Abigail, and then Toby – who went quiet with one last pained whine – and then Nightingale again.

“Everybody?” Nightingale said.

“I’m alright,” I said. I hadn’t felt anything physical, still couldn’t, past the rush of adrenaline and my own heartbeat, and that cigar-smell in the back of my nostrils. “Abigail?”

“Fine,” she said, but her voice was wobbly under the snap.

“You?” I asked Nightingale. His pulse was probably as rapid as mine but he looked normal enough; I know what it looks like when he’s covering for pain.

“Unaffected, so far as I can tell.” Nightingale bent down and picked the locket up, but slowly. “If I had to guess…that spell was waiting a long time to be triggered. It might not have had the intended effect.”

“Which was?”

Nightingale grimaced. “I don’t know. It felt familiar, certainly Newtonian magic, but the exact intent – I’m not sure.”

“Was there something in there?” asked Abigail.

“Only what you’d expect,” he said, and showed us. Molly bent in for a look too, a frown still creasing her forehead. Molly liked magic; she didn’t like unexplained magic, or worse yet, magical intrusions into her domain.  

Toby, having decided both the excitement and the walk were over, had flopped back on his side and was probably half-way asleep already.

There were two photographs in the locket, portraits from the neck up. They were a little creased and lacking protective glass, but the contrast was still good and the details clear.  They looked to date from the same time as the locket itself. I could hear the phantom voices of Harold Postmartin and Elsie Winstanley tutting at all of us for breathing on them. On one side was a young white man with regular but not particularly notable features and a period haircut, the other a young woman with her hair up in the style of the early twentieth century; both had the fixed expressions so common to photography of the era. It was hard to be certain from the sepia tones of the photo, but I thought she was Middle Eastern or Asian, maybe mixed-race.

“Recognise either of them?” I asked Nightingale.

He made an amused noise. “Peter, I’m fairly certain this predates me – although the man looks a little familiar, perhaps.”

“He looks smug,” was Abigail’s opinion. The longer I looked, the more I concurred.

“A fiver says whatever magic just happened, it was him,” I said.

“You never know,” said Nightingale, surprising me. “This lady could have been associated with the Société de la Rose and their offshoots. Or the photographs could have nothing to do with the enchantment.”

“And you’re sure it didn’t do anything.”

“Nothing seems out of place,” Nightingale said, glancing around, and at all of us in turn. “If it’s been lying around long enough – and this goes back well before the War, I think – it might have missed its target altogether.”

“So what was it meant to do?”

“You know as much as I do,” he pointed out, “maybe more, since you were examining it before I came in here.”

“You could _pretend_ you knew.”

“And condemn myself to doing all the research when you were out, to come up with an answer? Hardly worth it.” He gave me an amused look.

“I’m going home to Bev’s tonight, you’d have all the time you needed.”

Abigail shifted her weight from foot to foot, evidently bored by the grown-ups making fun of each other. “So you guys are going to keep it until you know what just happened?”

“I think we’d better,” said Nightingale.”

She sighed. “Fine. I knew you would. I never get to keep anything fun.”

“You have a somewhat disturbing definition of _fun_ ,” I observed, remembering one or two other things she’d found.

“Look who’s talking.”

Molly gave all of us one more intense stare – well I say all of us but mostly Nightingale, because he’s the only one she really worries about – and glided away. Toby got up and followed her, even though I would have sworn he was sound asleep.

_Does Molly have a telepathic connection with the dog_? may or may not be a question in my notebook. Pretty far down. I do have priorities.

“Were you headed home, Abigail, or were you going to stay for dinner?” Nightingale asked her. “You’re welcome to.”

“Peter was going to give me a lift. I’ve got some reading and stuff.”

“Was I?” I asked her pointedly.

“It’s raining,” she said, looking at me hopefully.

I exchanged a look with Nightingale, but he failed to give me a good excuse, the bastard.

“Fine, fine,” I said. “Come on then.”

Nightingale said goodbye to Abigail and asked if I’d be coming back or just going on to Bev’s, like I’d planned.

“Might as well,” I said. “Unless…” I frowned at the locket again. “What happens if that has lingering effects, or something?”

“I know how to get hold of you, and Molly’s got your number in a real emergency.”

I hesitated, but I really didn’t want to spend more time this afternoon driving around London than I had to. “Alright. See you tomorrow, then.” I kept my hands in my pockets, where they needed to be with Abigail right there.

Nightingale nodded to me, and turned, I suppose to head for the library. I told Abigail I was going to grab my jacket and keys, and she should meet me out back by the Ford Asbo Mark Five. Mid-way through speaking, I looked back at Nightingale. I think, looking back on it, Nightingale must have made a noise, but I don’t remember it. I just remember seeing him stumble and very nearly faceplant on the smooth marble of the atrium floor.

Molly, who’d been gliding off to go about her own business, had his elbow almost instantly. He shook her off as I took a quick step or two towards him.

“It’s alright, both of you. I slipped. Only damaging to my pride.”

Molly did not look convinced. He’d put a hand to his chest before he’d pulled it away; he was still prone to chest infections in the winter, even if he hated admitting it. And that spell –

“Okay,” I said anyway, because it was on him and he’d hate it if I fussed, and headed for the back hallway. I didn’t get four steps before Molly was holding him up again.

“What’s wrong?” Abigail demanded, voice tense. I retraced my steps, and the tight line of his jaw relaxed. Molly was glaring at me like I’d done something wrong.

“I think,” Nightingale said, in a much too controlled way, “I have an idea what that spell did.”

“It _was_ a trap?”

“Shit,” Abigail blurted out, then paused to see if anybody was going to tell her off, and then scowled to try and pretend she hadn’t.

“Well,” Nightingale said. He was standing up again now, as if nothing had happened, but I knew it had. Molly hovered. “Yes and no.”

I was pretty sure what it was, but I needed to confirm it, so I took a step backwards, then another. I was about eight or nine meters away when his shoulders tensed. I moved quickly forwards.

“It’s when I walk away, isn’t it,” I said. Shit. _Shit._

“How is that not a trap?” Abigail asked.

Nightingale smiled, but not happily. He was breathing deeply, the way you do after pain, or suffocation. I didn’t know which of those I liked less. “Maybe that is the best word for it, after all.”

I put a hand on his arm, and steered him back to one of the armchairs.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m staying right here, and _you’re_ explaining what you think is going on.”

*

Nightingale explained that while he wasn’t sure about the exact construction of the spell, he could recognise the proximity component, as he called it – a complicated, fifth-order thing that was only a part of the enchantment. In general, he said, it could be used to trigger an effect on two people as they got further and further away from each other. Now he mentioned it I recalled reading about it, but he’d never taught me how to put the full spell together because there’d never been a need for it. 

“Mostly you could use it for things like scouting,” he said, “when you needed to keep track of each other – you’d set it up so that it gave you a tug on the ear, or something like that.”

“I didn’t feel anything,” I said. “Anything at all, I just saw you – why didn’t I feel anything?”

There had been attempts to adapt the spell, he’d said, during the lead-up to the War, so it could be used on prisoners – you could, after all, set it up to do rather worse to someone than a tug on the ear.

“Like what?” Abigail wanted to know. “Or you’re not going to tell me like what because I’m not police or whatever, so tell me what it’s doing to _you_ , because it’s a bit my fault.”

“If we’re getting to that,” I said, “I triggered it when I used the microscope spell on it, didn’t I?” Nightingale didn’t say anything about my terminology; he’s got so much better about that sort of thing, although he still draws the line firmly at Pocket Quidditch. “Using magic near it. And then when you opened it, it was...primed.” There were more technical ways to explain that but I couldn’t be bothered going through them, especially not with Molly looming over me glowering.

“I think so,” said Nightingale.

“You didn’t answer the question,” said Abigail, who was clearly making a bid to demonstrate the levels of suspicious bastardry appropriate to a future police officer.

“I can’t breathe properly,” Nightingale said, quite bluntly.

Abigail did not look impressed. “Like…asthma? Or like Darth Vader kind of –”

“Like you’re being choked, or like you can’t get enough oxygen in,” I translated.

“I hate to disappoint you, but I understood the metaphor,” said Nightingale. “No, like asthma. Or –” he looked thoughtfully at the locket “- like my sisters used to complain about when they started wearing corsets.”

Nightingale still never really talks about his family, although I’ve heard a few more bits and pieces over the years, so this got him a sharp look from Abigail, who hasn’t.

Also, that was a mental image I hadn’t anticipated having today, or actually any day.

Molly had crossed her arms, and was looking thoughtful. I hadn’t actually ever considered the question of whether _she_ still – okay, that was a weird and not useful train of thought. I should ask Beverley later. She might know.

“It’d be really hard to prove it was magic,” Abigail said, slowly. “If it was back whenever this was made – it’s _old_ -old, right? And you gave someone a locket, and then they started having trouble breathing, because that could be asthma or corsets or consumption or whatever, women used to go around fainting all the time, and then you felt better when the person who gave it to you was around –” She wrinkled her nose. “ _Gross._ ”

“Quite,” said Nightingale. “But given that the spell was still waiting, and you couldn’t get it to cast twice, I don’t think – if there was any plan like that, it never succeeded.”

He opened the locket, and we looked at the photographs again.

“I wonder what happened to her,” I said. “Making the assumption that she was the target, of course.”

“I hope she did whatever the Victorian equivalent of kicking that guy in the balls was,” said Abigail. “Assuming he did it, or tried to do it to her.”

“I think the Victorian equivalent of that particular expression of displeasure was, in fact, the same as it is today,” said Nightingale. Molly, out of his sight, smirked a little, and I remembered she’d spent about thirty years belowstairs in the Folly when it was still full of the products of those bastions of gender equality, Casterbrook and Oxford. On the one hand, she was Molly, but on the other hand, there’s always some guy who’s just that dumb.

“Okay, enough speculation,” I said. “Tell me what I need to do to fix it and then I can get Abigail home without worrying about you retiring to a fainting couch.”

“Usually there’s some sort of action required,” Nightingale said. “It’s set into the spell. If we’d taken longer to look at it before I opened it we might have got some idea of what, but as it is...”

“Action,” Abigail repeated. “Like…a kiss to break the spell, or something?”

Nightingale just looked at her for a second before saying “You _could_ set that as a trigger, certainly, although I find it a somewhat unlikely possibility.”

“Also,” I added, “the guy who set this up must be dead, so it’s not like it matters.”

“I thought you said Peter activated it,” said Abigail. Nightingale looked slightly pained. “Well…”

Molly hid her mouth with her hand, which meant she was smiling. I gave her a dirty look. Abigail giggled.

“Just when we thought this was creepy enough already,” I said.

“We won’t watch, if you want to try it,” Abigail said, smirking.

Nightingale and I exchanged what were probably desperate looks.

“I think I endorse Peter’s sentiments on this,” he said.

“Okay, seriously,” Abigail said. “It’s got to be worth a quick try.”

We both stared at her.

“Unless you’re having, like, gay panic.” She wrinkled her nose. “Seriously. We won’t look.”

A silence set in. It was the sort of silence that has so much weight it’s subject to Newton’s second law. Molly was just watching us, head tilted and eyebrows raised, waiting to see what we did. Nightingale was managing to keep his face perfectly blank. I didn’t know what he was thinking about.

_I_ was thinking about waking up yesterday morning and the soft warmth of the kiss I’d given him before I’d got up to go for a run, the heavy drape of his arm across my bare back and the quiet noise of his breathing, and how I’d had a lot of kisses from Nightingale but all of them were still ours, and I wasn’t fucking giving one up to some Victorian-era stalker’s left-over spell unless I had no other choice about it.

Molly might have guessed that, or something like. Abigail wouldn’t, because Abigail – I hoped – had no idea I’d ever even _thought_ about kissing Nightingale or vice versa. This was not the place or time to make her party to that particular piece of knowledge.

“Look,” I said, mostly speaking to Nightingale. “If this was someone from the Folly – I mean, between you and me we’re pretty much the world experts on the British tradition of Newtonian magic, right? So if anybody can figure this out…”

“Good God, I suppose we are,” said Nightingale. “What a terrifying thought. But I take your point, and I know there are ways to disarm this sort of spell without fulfilling whatever requirements it has – which could be anything, really. We’re just going to have to try a few different things.”

“I still say it’d be worth a try,” said Abigail, “but then again Beverley told me the other week she’s a bit overdue for a flood, so you probably don’t want to give her a reason.”

“Right,” said Nightingale, decisively. “Let’s take this to the lab, just in case.”  

*

None of the things we tried over the next hour worked; every time Nightingale got further from me than about thirty feet, his oxygen intake decreased precipitously, or I’m sure we would have measured that if we’d had the right equipment. I made some notes for Dr Vaughan and Dr Walid, because I was really curious about how you’d achieve that particular effect. He was still physically breathing, so was it constricting blood-flow to the lungs, or actually filtering out oxygen, or maybe using it up before it could get to the red blood cells – but I couldn’t think how you’d do that without some really problematic side-effects –

“Why are you taking so many notes?” Abigail asked me.

“It’s important to know what _hasn’t_ worked,” I said, and stopped writing and flipped my notebook shut.  I’m not totally sure she bought it, not least because she blatantly tried to read over my shoulder. Nightingale gave me a look, because he could probably figure out where my mind was going. The most awkward moment was sometime in the middle when I had to use the loo and of course Nightingale had to follow me and stand in the hall.

“You know, we _could_ try Abigail’s suggestion,” he said when I came out. “More improbable things have been true.”

“Firstly, she’d never let us live it down,” I said, “and secondly, I don’t want to.”

I waited for him to ask me why, but he didn’t, thank god; he just squeezed my shoulder and we went back to the lab.

By five o’clock Abigail was already late home – her father might have been a little picky about that on account of one or two entirely not that dangerous incidents in the last few years – and nothing we’d tried had worked.

“We could damage it physically,” I said. “Melt it down, even. Would that work?”

“I’m just saying,” said Abigail, staring at the locket and frowning. “Breaking curses with a kiss has to be a classic for a reason.”

“It’s not a curse, technically,” said Nightingale, wiping a hand over his face. “And it’s a classic in fiction, not Newtonian practice.”

“What’s the difference? With it not being a curse, ‘technically’.” Abigail did the air quotes and everything.

Molly appeared in the doorway and tapped Abigail on the shoulder, then pointed to her jeans pocket, where her phone was safely turned off.

“It’s my dad, isn’t it?” Abigail said to her, making a face. “Did he phone the main line? Oh, _fuck,_ it’s past five –”

Molly gave her a very stern look and Abigail tried to appear innocent. “I mean, oops, it’s past five? _Was_ it my dad?”

Molly shook her head, and managed to indicate through some pointing and possibly mild telepathy that it had been worse. It had been my mum, deputised to investigate because she has back channels to the Folly, like Nightingale’s mobile number. Which he wasn’t answering, because he was in the lab – the same reason I wasn’t answering mine.

“I’ve really got to go home,” Abigail said, sliding down off the stool she’d been sitting on. She grimaced at us. “I’m really sorry about…I didn’t have any idea –”

“As usual with this sort of thing, it was a series of mis-steps on several people’s parts,” said Nightingale. “You did the right thing bringing the locket here.” It was lying on the lab bench, having attained by this point the sort of baleful aura, at least in our heads, or at least in _my_ head, that could have rivaled the One Ring’s. Although maybe only in the first part of the first movie, before Frodo leaves the Shire.

“Alright, then,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

Abigail shook her head, clearly determined to offer up something on the altar of her guilt. “I can get myself home. I bet it’s stopped raining.”

Molly shook her head in return at Abigail’s last statement. Now I was thinking about it, the edge of her skirts was a little damp. She’d probably been skiving off in the tech cave on Twitter while we were distracted. One of these days I was going to ignore Nightingale and just get her a cheap tablet or something so she didn’t have to sneak out there anymore. Pretending not to notice was getting a bit exhausting.

“I said I’d take you,” I told Abigail. “Come on, before I change my mind.”

“Fine, I guess,” she sighed, meaning her guilt wasn’t _that_ deep.

“Let me grab a few things,” said Nightingale. “I suppose you’ll still be wanting to go home to Bev’s.”

“Oh, yeah.” I’d managed to forget for a second there. “You’ll have to –” I noticed Abigail’s eyebrows go up. “Uh, you sure that’s alright?”

Nightingale said it was and went to get his overnight bag; Molly followed him, probably to take it off him and check he’d packed it right. I trailed behind because I had to.

Abigail followed alongside me. “Is Bev going to mind him sleeping on her couch or whatever?”

“She’s got a spare room,” I said. “And how is any of this your business, again?”

“Because it’s my fault?”

“Are you _looking_ to be in trouble about it?”

“No!” Abigail folded her arms. “I just wish there was something I could _do_ about it.”

These days, what with working in a specialist unit and all, I generally don’t end up at crime scenes until they’ve already happened and the witnesses – or victims, or suspects, or in really fun cases option D, all of the above – have been corralled off by local PCs. But when you _are_ on the scene of an incident in progress, especially one involving injuries or fatalities, one of the biggest problems can be those responsible – not always in the legal sense – trying to help and getting in the way. That’s why we have uniforms to get them off the scene and being statemented. Abigail was shaping up to do something stupid, I could tell.

“Listen,” I said. “You have to promise me something.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “What?”

“That you're not going to try and sneak back here to look stuff up,” I said, “or call people you know, or try and fix this. We’re going to get this sorted out, okay?”  

_“_ Are you _sure_ , though?”

“Yes, I’m bloody sure,” I said, even though I wasn’t, because that was lesson two about dealing with people who were trying to fix what they’d just broken; you needed them to really believe you had it all in hand. They usually didn’t take much convincing.

*

Nightingale drove once we’d dropped Abigail off, so I could call Bev and let her know what had happened. I didn’t get an answer, which meant she was probably underwater, or driving herself, or talking to a friend, or any number of things, but underwater was the most likely because I knew she’d been in the river this afternoon. I left a short message so she’d have a heads-up before she got home, because I’m considerate like that.

Bev got back about nine o’clock. The French windows in the bedroom open onto the garden, so the first we knew about it was when she opened the door to the living room, changed out of her wetsuit into an old Met t-shirt she’d stolen off me and a wrap skirt. Her feet were bare and still damp.

“Is something wrong?” she asked as soon as she saw Nightingale. He comes over pretty often, but not without warning.

“It’s lovely to see you, too,” he said.

“You didn’t check your phone?” I asked.

“You know what I meant,” Bev retorted, but without rancor. To me – “And if it was an emergency you’d have texted as well. So what is it?”

“You have to promise not to laugh, because there’s some bits that aren’t funny,” I said, pulling her down onto the sofa next to me, and to her credit she didn’t until I got to the point where Abigail had accused us of having gay panic.

“So _could_ that fix it?” she wanted to know.

“Possibly,” said Nightingale, “but I don’t find myself inclined to test it, given the implications.”

Bev’s disapproving expression is uncannily like Ty’s, something I’ve never been sure whether I should point out to her or not. She nodded, and shuffled around so she was curled up in the corner of the sofa, with her legs on top of mine. “Yeah, okay. This still isn’t the stupidest thing that’s ever happened to either of you.”

“I’m not going to ask what you think is,” said Nightingale, with a twitch of a smile.

“Well, for you it’s probably something I don’t even know about,” she said. “It’s just all of Peter’s misadventures I know the details of.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I don’t think I ever told you about the thing at Kew. You were upstream then.”

“Nah, but Sahra did.”

“Sahra wasn’t even there! I hadn’t even met her then.”

“Alexander probably told her about it,” Nightingale suggested.

“You know,” I said, “if you’d told me a few years back one of the problems in my life would be Seawoll’s tendency to office gossip –”

“I wouldn’t let him catch you calling it that.”

“– ‘cause that’s what it is, if you’d told me that, it might have been enough inducement to give up on the whole idea of being a wizard.”

“I rather doubt that,” said Nightingale, picking up his pencil again. Bev was trying to reach for the remote and failing, so I handed it to her.

“Hey, I said to her, “I don’t suppose _you_ have any ideas about how to fix this,” even though I knew there wasn’t any chance; Nightingale was shaking his head even as I said it.

Bev laughed. “Nothing to do with me. This is wizard business, and you know it.”

It was kind of reassuring, the way she said it – like she didn’t believe for a second we _wouldn’t_ fix it.

“I live in hope,” I told her, and she kissed me on the forehead. “I know you do.”

“I think I have another idea or two, anyway,” said Nightingale. “Just nothing it’s worth rushing to try tonight. It’s not harming us.”

“All else fails, we can just smash it or melt it down,” I said. “That might work.”

“Better hope neither of you gets called out in the middle of the night, then,” said Beverley. “You’d have fun explaining that one.”

I groaned, and slapped my forehead. “Bollocks, I just remembered. I’ve got that meeting with Guleed and Stephanopoulos tomorrow at eight-thirty.”

“Remind me?” said Nightingale.

“Lessons from the Sheridan case,” I said. “You were invited. You just never answered any of the emails.”

“It didn’t sound that important,” he said, a little bit shiftily. Nightingale is very bad at attending meetings he doesn’t think are important, because nobody made him do it for about half a century, and usually I’m there anyway. Now he has a mobile phone and email it’s a lot harder for him to get away with it. I maintain that one of the consequences of functional immortality, which is more or less very slow time travel, is having to deal with the century you find yourself living in. I don’t think he’s totally convinced.  

“When are meetings ever important,” said Beverley, who was suffering through a great many more of them than she was used to now she’d started her PhD. I’d found it quite funny until I’d realised Ty also thought it was funny, and then I’d had to stop out of principle. Me agreeing with Lady Ty too often just gets uncomfortable for both of us. Ironically, this is one of the only things we unquestioningly agree on.

“Your mum has them all the time,” I said.

Beverley waved a hand, nearly hitting me in the nose. “Mum doesn’t have meetings, she has audiences, and that’s different.”

“I would have put it in your calendar if you really needed to go,” I said to Nightingale. “I guess now you’re going anyway.”

“You going to tell them why?” asked Beverley.

“Only if Miriam’s in a particularly terrible mood,” said Nightingale, with a wry smile. “She’ll find it absolutely hilarious.”

I contemplated this. “She will, too.”

“I don’t have to be anywhere tomorrow until eleven,” said Beverley, sounding much too smug, as she turned the TV on so we could all argue about what to put on and she could win.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, adjusting one of her legs where it was starting to cut off circulation to mine. “Good for you.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Good for me.”

*

I dossed down with Nightingale in the spare room, because otherwise we’d have had to move a bunch of furniture around to get within the thirty-foot radius, and he never sleeps in Beverley’s bed, no matter the circumstances. You’ve got to have boundaries, with the sort of thing we have going on. I fell asleep while Nightingale was still checking something on his phone. He always sleeps less than I do. It’s taken a few years but now he’s just as bad as the rest of us with electronic devices, although he will deny it until his dying day, if he ever gets one. I find that weirdly comforting.

Nothing exciting happened overnight, thank God, except for me being woken up by Bev crawling into bed behind me sometime after midnight and before dawn – I didn’t wake up enough to check the time.

“It got cold,” she whispered in my ear. “Shove over.”

This was a more involved procedure than she made it sound, since Nightingale has octopus-like tendencies when sharing a bed, but I wriggled over and Bev dug her nose into the back of my neck and I rolled back under again, caught comfortingly between them. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice when it does. Nightingale’s breathing stayed deep and even the whole night, at least the parts of it I was awake to notice.

Beverley got up when we did _even though_ she didn’t have anywhere she had to be until eleven – a noble concession on her part, I agreed – and we had breakfast together, more or less, at the kitchen table. This mostly provided an opportunity for Nightingale to get caught up on the latest Thames family gossip, something he has developed a personal as well as a professional interest in now Mama Thames has decided Beverley is at least partially responsible for him. The rest of her daughters and their families have, naturally, followed Mama’s lead, although Ty doesn’t like it. Neither Beverley or Nightingale is very impressed by it either, but even Nightingale knows better than to try and argue with Mama Thames.

Beverley sent us off with a kiss for me and a pat on the shoulder for Nightingale, and the admonition that we should definitely fix this before anybody else found out about it.

“We know,” I said. “There’s being in danger, and then there’s looking like we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s much worse.”

“Exactly,” said Beverley.

*

Seawoll had decided to attend that morning’s meeting. I wasn’t going to ask why, but he caught the way I looked at him and grunted “Everybody’s been much too well-behaved around here. This is the last vaguely active case we have.” Then he caught sight of Nightingale. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Everybody’s been unusually well-behaved in our area of responsibility, too,” said Nightingale, which was surprisingly true, “but if you must know, we’re having a minor magical mishap and I can’t get further away than thirty feet from Peter.”

Seawoll, Stephanopoulos, and Guleed all stared at him as if waiting for the punchline, which demonstrated either a much better knowledge of Nightingale’s sense of humor than I expected any of them to have, or that they were all experienced police officers, and didn’t believe anything they heard. I figured it was about thirty-seventy, in that order.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Seawoll, but with more resignation than disgust.  

“You asked,” said Nightingale, shrugging.

“It’s not dangerous, so it wasn’t worth moving the meeting a fourth time, or we’d be fixing it right now,” I added.

“Fixing it how?” asked Seawoll, which could also go on the list of _problems I never expected to have_ : how to explain magic in technical terms to DCI Seawoll.

“It’s the sort of spell that usually has a trigger to break it, but we don’t know what that was, because neither of us cast it originally,” I said. “So we’re working on ways to dispel it. It’s just a matter of going through strategies, it’s not even very interesting.” 

“A trigger? Like what?” Guleed asked. “True love’s kiss, or something?”

“Jesus _Christ,_ Sahra,” I said, because of course she’d had to have that idea.

Nightingale just kept his face very blank and said “I doubt it.”

“Don’t think your better half would think much of that,” said Stephanopoulos, nodding towards me with a grin.

“We’d have had it sorted out this morning,” I said. “It just wasn’t urgent enough to move the meeting again.”

“If you’re all bloody done,” said Seawoll emphatically, “can we get on with it?”

*

“Would that even work?” Seawoll asked me quietly after the meeting, while we were all picking up our things and Nightingale was still talking to Guleed.

“Would what work?”

“The…” He scowled. “Kissing thing.”

I did not bury my face in my hands, despite severe temptation. “It’s _incredibly_ unlikely.”

“Hmph.” Seawoll looked away from me. “I’m just saying, this is going to be bloody tedious for both of you if it keeps on, and nobody’d think anything of it, even your Beverley. It wouldn’t be the weirdest bollocks that’s happened around here by a long shot.”

“What wouldn’t be?” Nightingale asked, having fortunately drifted in only for the very last part of that conversation.

“We have a lot of other things to try,” I said loudly, and dragged Nightingale out of the meeting room. Stephanopoulos smirked at us as we left.

I think I liked it better when Seawoll and her avoided all mentions of the m-word like the plague. It made them way less inclined to speculate on stuff they didn’t know anything about.

“Beverley’s asking if we’ve had any luck so far,” said Nightingale; I hadn’t checked my phone yet, but when I did she’d messaged both of us. I texted back saying no, we’d just got out of the meeting.

_How’d that go?_ she asked.

_Dire,_ I replied. _Don’t ask._

_Wouldn’t dream of it,_ she shot back, which meant she’d just texted Guleed.

There were several texts of increasing levels of worry from Abigail, too; she had lectures at uni all morning but apparently that wasn’t distracting her.

“How long did you say it took to just wear off?” I asked Nightingale. “The version of this spell you knew.”

“It was variable,” Nightingale said. “Anything from a few hours to a few weeks, unless the caster broke it. If you let it _get_ cast, there wasn’t much to be done about it. I’m working off solutions we used for other kinds of enchantments.”

We hadn’t got anywhere by lunchtime, and I was trying not to let my frustration show. It wasn’t going to help. Nightingale, after one more unsuccessful attempt, put the locket down on the bench with more force than was strictly necessary. I must have made a face, because he sighed. “This is…”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It is.”

Molly showed up in the doorway, presumably to find out if we were going to be eating lunch. She looked between us and frowned.

“No, we’ve made no progress,” Nightingale said.

“Unless you have any ideas?” I asked, half-joking.

She glided over, picked up the locket chain using only her thumb and forefinger, like it was unpleasant to touch, and dropped it onto the floor. Then she mimed stomping on it.

“What – destroy it?”

She nodded, and walked out.

“Why haven’t we tried that?” I asked out loud, mostly to myself but partially to Nightingale.

“That doesn’t seem like it...” he trailed off. “It doesn’t seem…why _haven’t_ we?”

“Let’s go and talk about this somewhere else,” I suggested, and we decamped to the library. I checked my phone, since it had been off most of the morning. There was a text from Guleed saying she was popping by in a couple of hours with a potential case, and another from Abigail.

_Caroline says you need to get rid of it._

I stared at that for a few seconds, sighed, and showed it to Nightingale. I’d known she was shaping up for something stupid. It’s not that I don’t like Caroline, you understand – it’s that I don’t like giving her ammunition I don't have to.

“I hope she was circumspect about what she said to her,” he said.

“Caroline knows how to keep her mouth shut,” I said. “I think. But that seems like a really good idea, doesn’t it? Now?”

“Absolutely worth a go,” he agreed. “But is it going to seem like a good idea when we go back up there?”

“That’s what I’m wondering,” I agreed, and we went back up.

And the closer I got to the lab, the more I found myself thinking – it was quite pretty, and it was an antique, and maybe we should track down who the people in the photos were, that might help, and what if destroying it ruined _any_ chance of breaking the spell, and there were still some things we hadn’t tried, and –

“Never trust magical jewellery,” I said.

Nightingale grimaced. “I’ve suddenly got a laundry list of reasons why this is a terrible idea – you?”

“Just to be on the safe side, let’s heat up the forge the old-fashioned way,” I said, and we did.

I took a picture of the locket and the photographs inside it – we could look into that later, or maybe Abigail could, it’d make her feel like she was making up for the whole thing – and Nightingale picked it up and put it into a crucible. He set his jaw as he put it over the heat, and I had to fold my arms to stop myself snatching it out, even though I would have burned myself. But I could feel now that the anxiety wasn’t coming from me – it was coming from somewhere else.

“God, this is a nasty piece of work,” Nightingale said, and I put my hand on his shoulder. It was hard to see with the heat and light off the forge, even though we hadn’t put a lid on the crucible, and I was half-worried this _was_ going to turn out to be a One Ring situation and the damn thing wouldn’t melt. But, all of a sudden, the worry dissolved and it was like a car windscreen clearing of fog you weren’t quite sure was building up: of course destroying the damn thing made sense. I’d suggested it _twice_ , and nobody had even said it was a bad idea – it had just…drifted out of my head, and Nightingale’s too.

Beside me, Nightingale took a deep breath. “I think that’s it. Want to test it?”

I turned him around and gave him a little shove, feeling his back warm under my hand. “Go on. I’ll turn this off.”

He walked across the lab, and he walked out the door, and out of sight, and I saw his shoulders relax as he did. I could feel mine doing the same thing. It was _gone._

It had been less than twenty-four hours, now I thought about it clearly. It felt like a lot longer.

I followed him out and walked to the balcony railing; he was standing in the main atrium, tall and upright, much more than thirty feet away. He grinned up at me. “Seems to have worked!”

“Oh thank _god_ ,” I said, and headed for the stairs, leaving the locket to cool into a silver mass in the lab behind me. We could deal with that later.

Nightingale was still grinning at me as I reached the atrium. “That was easier than I expected.”

“Alright, come here,” I said, because I wanted to kiss him and I could and nobody else had anything to say about it, and Nightingale stepped in and stayed there, because that's where he wanted to be, and nobody else had anything to say about that, either. It’s weird how you don’t notice how often you do something until there’s a reason for you to _not_ do it.

Being strictly honest, I’ve had a lot of kisses in my life and quite a few of them from Nightingale, and it wasn’t anything particularly memorable, but it was nice all the same. It was so nice, in fact, it went on a bit longer than I’d planned it to, since we were technically at work. (Of course, living at the Folly blurs this distinction somewhat.)

We were interrupted by a polite cough.

I remembered, with a dim sense of dread, that Guleed was coming over, and Molly never bothered announcing her these days.

“So,” Guleed said after a pointed beat. “Did it work?”

It took me at least ten seconds to figure out what she was on about, but by the time I did Nightingale had already said “Yes,” very firmly, and crossed the room to demonstrate.

“Uh,” I said. “Yeah. Yep. We’re good.”

Guleed made a face. “I think that’s just made the top ten weirdest things that have happened to you two.” Her face split into a grin. “Don’t worry; I won’t mention it to Bev.”

“You’re lying,” I said, “and she knows anyway.”

“What, you got permission to test your hypothesis first?” Guleed said, enjoying herself far too much for my peace of mind. “Or are you suggesting this happens on the regular?”

“Clearly,” said Nightingale, and I don’t know what my face looked like but Guleed was too busy gaping at him to notice. He gave me the shadow of a wink. I had to laugh. Guleed pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Please don’t do that to me.” She looked at her phone. “I already texted her a picture.”

“Seriously,” I said, trying to be casual. “It’s fine.”

As I told Bev later: I think the fact that I didn’t say _it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before_ in that moment is as good an exemplar of my self-control as any.

“Good,” said Guleed, “because I need one of you to come with me, but two would definitely be overkill.”

In the car, she said “Is that the weirdest thing you’ve ever had to do for this job, or what?”

“No,” I said, “mostly because unicorns, but can we just…not talk about it?”

She gave me a very odd look. “I wasn’t – does it really bother you that much? You guys get on. And that’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve had to do since I got landed working with you lot, now I think about it.”

“Yeah, um – it’s fine, glad to get it other with, so what’s this case?” I said, but I don’t think I was very convincing.

Fuck.

*

“I was totally joking!” Abigail said to me next weekend. “But – did it work? It wasn’t too bad, was it? He probably hasn’t kissed anybody for like, a hundred years. Wait, does that mean it _was_ a curse?”

“No, no, no, and no,” I said, and watched her try to work that out. I’d thought about lying to her, but if she did want to be an apprentice – well, an official apprentice at the Folly, aside from my now nearly-confirmed suspicions – I couldn’t lie to her about how magic worked. Lots of other things, probably, but not that.

“It…didn’t work?” She frowned at me. “But he’s not here.”

“We melted down the locket,” I said. “Like Caroline told you. That worked. I can give you the silver to give back to your friend, but...”

“That’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth to explain,” she said pragmatically. “Never mind.” She gave me a sideways look. “Then why...you know what, I don’t want to know.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She opened the County Practitioner’s record for Cornwall, 1878, that we’d been looking at. “Nothing at all.”

About half an hour later she said, out of nowhere, “You and Bev are cool, right?”

I couldn’t work out where the hell that had come from and then I could and I didn’t want to have. “What makes you think we’re not?”

She hesitated for a moment, but just said “Nothing, you know, just asking,” and then, as if struck by inspiration, “Your mum was asking again about when you’re going to have kids.”

I groaned. “I’m not having that conversation by proxy.”

“I keep waiting for people to start asking when I’m going to have kids,” she offered, in sympathy. “Right now everybody’s still yelling at me about not having them yet, but there’s, like, this switch. I’ve watched it happen to about five cousins. It’s coming.”

“I have precisely no opinions on your future reproductive decisions, if it helps,” I said.

“Good,” Abigail said, firmly. And then: “But…you are cool, right?”

I looked her straight in the eye. “Abigail. We’re fine. And if there are any other questions you’re trying to ask, just ask them.”

“You know what,” she said. “There aren't.”

“Okay,” I said. “And I’m not going to ask any questions about why you asked Lady Caroline Linden-Limmer for help. Sound fair?”

She twitched, guiltily. I was so right about that.

That was going to be interesting.  

*

Two weeks later, I got a text from Guleed that read I DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE YOU. I replied asking for more specifics, but she didn’t respond. I was pretty sure Bev had said something about them having lunch this week, so I had my suspicions. They were confirmed the next time I met her at a crime scene and she scowled at me while we were changing into our noddy suits.

 “Can’t you do _anything_ normally?” she said, apropos of nothing at all.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” I said, helpfully.

“I had lunch with Bev,” she said, hooking the hood carefully over her hijab. “How long has that been going on?”

I contemplated pushing for clarification but she didn’t seem in the mood. “A while?”

“Were you even really breaking the spell?”

“No,” I said. “We’d done that. We were just glad to be back to normal.”

“Ughhhhhhh,” said Guleed. “I don’t want to know.”

I concentrated on slipping the protectors over my shoes and held my breath, because Guleed could make this very difficult for all of us if she wanted to.

 “You lucky bastard,” she said, after a few moments.  

“Yeah,” I agreed, trying not to sag with relief; when I looked up, she still didn’t look impressed, although she never does anyway, but she met my eyes. “And don’t I know it.”


End file.
